November 24th, 2006

So Crappy Together

“Now Bobby — you probably don’t have any idea about this — but does Stephanie have the color scheme for your apartment?” In the weeks before the wedding I must have heard this question, almost verbatim, ten times from concerned aunts/female cousins/male friends who are gay, before they went shopping for our gift.

This was pretty amusing to me, on many levels….

For starters, it was always the color scheme. I mean, since we’d be married, of course we’d have a color scheme in our new dwelling, it was just a question of whether it has been set up yet. Like joint checking.

Also, the color scheme was a decree that only Steph could issue and that then should be passed on to them via me…. Hey, ladies, I’m a graphic designer. I went to art school. I know my primary from my secondary from my tertiary. You could ask me what our color scheme was. I’d know all about it. Women are always assuming that men, as a gender, do not understand the concept of color, and that words like “earthtone” and “pastel” meaning nothing to us. More of us get it than you’d think. I’m a guy and I bet I could choose a great color scheme for our apartment. (Of course, I never ever would, because I’m a guy. For the life of me, I cannot understand why the colors that adorn my home are so important. For example, if it were up to me, all our walls would remain stark white. I mean I’d hang some cool stuff on them to make them interesting, but I’d also use all those hours I would have spent drop-clothing and masking-taping and washing-out brushes to do things like drink beer and decide on a name for a boat, should I ever get one…. Why am I speaking my mind so freely here in the parentheses? Is some sort of soliloquy that only my closest confidants can read? “Hey, confidants, this is just between you and me…and the trillions of other people with internet access.” Ridiculous. I’m not even going to use a closing parenthesee. Let’s just continue from here.

Finally there’s the fact that…how do I put this delicately?…. This is Steph we’re talking about. The only color scheme she knows is “lots.” Lots of colors…preferably bright ones…all butted up against each other. For proof of this, take one look at the way she dresses. God help you if you are epileptic.

Please don’t think I’m complaining that I was asked about our color scheme, though. I appreciate that you’re trying to help us achieve a coherent look. As a matter of fact, I wish you more decorating-conscious friends and relatives would pay us a visit and help us out right now. Steph and I are both so overcommited and preoccupied that, after a month and a half of marriage, we’ve barely started unpacking. We live out of cardboard boxes and laundry baskets. We survive on doggybags from the times we’ve gone out and eaten somewhere.

Worse than our current quality of life though, is the possibility that Steph is going to find a free moment and start setting up our new place by herself. For as long as I’ve known her, Steph’s approach to interior design has been…unique. Many years ago, we got to know each other through mutual friends and one of the first times I ever hung out with her, we all went up to her dorm room. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen. Her half of the room was like a dense forest. Literally. She had huge tree branches she’d hauled inside, attached to the wall-mounted bookshelves, extending out into the room. Streamers and broken CDs on fishing line hung above her bed. I think all the posters she’d ever owned in her life were layered on the walls. All of this was draped with strands of Christmas lights. It was, I have to say, it was one of the coolest things I have ever seen. I remember thinking to myself “I wonder if this person has mental problems.” Today I am married to her.

“Accumulate lots and lots of crap that you like, for any variety of reasons, place it in the first available space you find, and leave it there forever.” This is feng-shui, Steph-style. And I know, I know, it sounds whimsical and eccentric. And it is. But don’t mistake it for its more elegant and pragmatic counterparts. This is not “Eclectic” or “Thrift Cool” or “Shabby Chic” or “Boho” or whatever the hell they’re calling the hodge-podge look that they featured in trendy decorating magazines like Dwell or Domino, where people who could not clutter up a living space if their lives depended on it attempt to look as though they enjoy going out to farms and rubbing elbows with common, salt-of-the-earth folk and bargaining with them for their old, beat-up junk. (Deep down inside you just know these decorators hate the sight of chipping paint and the fact that none of their furniture matches.) This not that. If I had to come up with a name for the look I am talking about, I would call it the “Crap-Thrown-Together” look. It is letters from best friends tacked right into the wall next to a cool page ripped out a magazine next to the power bill. It is flower pots on top of lidless tupperwares overflowing with paper scraps on top of cd players that no longer work on top of plastic milk crates…as a coffee table. It is never being able to find your cell phone or keys. It is, occasionally, tree branches falling down and hitting you on the head. I don’t want this for our new apartment.

Still, very soon I plan to write a feature on the “hot new” Crap-Thrown-Together look to submit to the trendy decor magazines. Either the editors will recognize it for the unlivable horror it is or — I think this is much more likely — we’ll cash in big on my wife’s eccentricity…and my ability to lay in on with a snow shovel.

I will use the money we make to get our place decorated properly.

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October 25th, 2006

’Space Cadets

A great new MySpace page has been brought to my attention…. But a little explanation first….

Steph and I know many very talented musicians, and we were able to get three different “groups” to come play during our wedding ceremony. To keep everyone in the choir loft straight we gave out sheets with the order of the songs and who would be playing them. There were notes by each song that said “Cousins Group,” “St. Michael’s Group,” or “Friends Group.”

Well, “Friends Group” really, really liked being “Friends Group.” So much so, that they now have this: myspace.com/friendsgroup.

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October 24th, 2006

This American Wife

In the future, when people come up to me and ask what the secret to having a fun and exciting wedding is, I will say to them: “Careful and serious planning.” Everything that happens related to the wedding must be formally mapped out, way in advance, so it can be executed with precision timing and a steely resolve.

“But wait,” those of you who were involved in my wedding are thinking “Many, many…many…many of the things that took place at your wedding seemed ‘unrehearsed’ or even ‘spur of the moment’.”

Ha-ha-ha-ha! My friend, you could not be more wrong. Just look at these specific instructions I gave to various participants in the wedding, years and years ago:

1. Family-staying-at-my-parent’s-house: Let’s make picking up the last round of relatives at the airport a real event! Crazy Aunt Louie, you should decide that all 20 people currently staying at Mom and Dad’s house need to caravan to the airport to welcome the last members of the family in. Let’s have the kids make a 30-foot-long banner (complete with decorative illustrations), listing the full names of all of the Omaha Witchgers we are going to pick up, and have them unroll it and hold it up proudly in the crowded baggage claim at RDU. Oh yes, and have Uncle Andy, who may or may not have had a few drinks at this point, decide to bring his bagpipes along and stand behind the kids, playing at full volume as they unravel the banner. My guess is this will result in 250–300 onlookers being thoroughly stunned; two very confused information-desk-staff-ladies to call security; and newly-arrived family members who have quickly figured out what is going on to stagger to the front of the crowd, laughing so hard they can barely breath. Kate, you tape all this.

2. Chevy Nova: I’ve owned you for so long, I’d like nothing more than to use you as the wedding “getaway car.” When I get in you, on the morning before the day of wedding, and take off to run an errand, I should find, as I come to the stop-sign on the corner, that it is nearly impossible to stop you. After a white-knuckled grind to a halt, I should discover that you are completely out of brake fluid. Dad and cousin Andy (God bless ’em) should have to spend a sizable portion of the day changing both of your rear wheel cylinders for me.

3. Friends and siblings: Make secret plans to take me out and tear it up one last time after the rehearsal dinner. Have everyone assume that someone else has told me about this. When everyone has gathered at the bar, I’ll be over at Kinko’s copying the programs for the next day.

4. Church: I’d like a Colombian priest to witness the vows. One, who, when he says my name, says it “Bup,” causing me to flinch a little and my friends and family to take note, so they can do their own personal impressions of this pronunciation afterward. They will each only come up to me and say “Hi Bup!” once for each time my name is spoken by the priest. Over the course of the one-hour Nuptial mass, this will be approximately 5,200.

5. Kate/bridesmaid/guerilla-documentary-filmmaker: Do not consult either Steph or I about the fact that you plan to sneak a video camera, concealed behind your bouquet, up to the altar to make your own covert record of the ceremony. If we knew you were going to do this, we would probably ask you not to try it. If you just go ahead with it, we won’t even know ’til it’s all over.

6. Bridal party/friends: Defile the Nova so badly that, when Stephanie and I get in to do a “fake leaving” from the reception while the light is still good for pictures, and drive away to circle the block, a dense wad of shaving cream and paper decorations will fly up and cake the windshield. My windshield wipers should only smear this mess over the entire area, rendering it completely opaque. The sides of the car should be adorned so that, even when desperately rolling the windows down, all that is visible is a dense layer of festive party streamers. At this point, Steph and I will need to make our way off the road safely by using sonar-like navigation. Conveniently, we’ll already be emitting high-pitched shrieks.

7. Reception Dancers: Please foil my attempt to make our wedding “Electric Slide”-free. The fact that I’ve removed that song from the dance playlist is not nearly enough to guarantee a wedding sans-Slide and you know it. At some point a good amount of you who are insistent on doing this dance will be on the floor. Once you identity a song with the appropriate tempo, locate one other, organize yourselves with frightening speed, and engulf all the dancers around you. Before I know it I’ll turn around from catching up with some distant relative and the floor will be “Electric!” I must come to know the power of The Slide.

8. Crazy Aunt Louie: When we regroup the morning after at my parents’ house, and, in front of all the visiting relatives, we open the many wonderful wedding presents we’ve received, please make sure you discreetly rewrap things we’ve already opened, write a random family member’s name on them, and hand them to us to open as if they are new presents. It will cause us, to everyone else’s great amusement, to believe we’ve gotten four or five of the same gift and to be confused as to why we were sent separate presents from the same people in completely different boxes. It will take us a while to catch on.

9. Jaime: For a wedding gift we’d like something that breathes and eats and poops. Say, I don’t know, a gerbil. We could call him “Wedding Gerbil” while deciding exactly what we are going to do with him. Only I bet it will take us a few hours too long to come up with a new name, and by then “Wedding Gerbil” will have stuck. We will become attached to him and give him the nickname “Wedger” a few days later.

10. Me: Get terribly sick on the honeymoon. They say airports are breeding grounds for germs, and gathering people from all kinds of different airports around you before the wedding means you’re asking for it. Don’t feel sorry for yourself, though. You took a very small and inexpensive honeymoon to the beach, which you’ll be able to cut short to come home and recover. It’s like you knew it was going to happen!

Of course, if you haven’t figured out that these are not directions I gave out before the wedding, then you are many, many bricks short of a load. Each item does, however, describe something that actually happened at some point during the weekend before last.

We had no idea any of this craziness was going to occur, but, believe me, if we had it to do over, we’d still find the room for all of it….

Except maybe getting sick on the honeymoon…. Honestly, that just sucked.

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